The economist as social engineer: Maxi-max decision, utopia and the need for professional economic ethics

by George DeMartino, University of Denver

Real-World Economics Review, Issue no. 56, (March 2011), 36 —

[An excerpt from the Article reads]:

The economics profession has attracted a good bit of attention lately due to revelations regarding the failure of influential economists to disclose potential conflicts of interest when serving in the role of public intellectual. For this we are indebted to filmmaker Charles Ferguson, whose film “Inside Job” ought to serve as a wake-up call to a profession that has suppressed its ethical obligations for over a century. Even worse, the film makes clear that the economists it exposes have never given the matter of disclosure a moment’s thought prior to being grilled on camera by Mr. Ferguson. The film spawned several studies that further documented a failure to disclose among leading economists, and pressure from the business press on the AEA to explain just why it has no general rules or guidelines that speak to this issue (Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbarth 2010; Flitter, Cooke and da Costa 2010). In response, the AEA established a committee “to consider the Association’s existing disclosure and other ethical standards and potential extensions to those standards.”

These developments are important: like doctors (who sometimes shill for pharmaceutical companies), economists must routinely be required to disclose their financial entanglements so that the public can make informed judgments about the dependability of the economic advice they receive. Economics ought to adopt rules similar to those in place in other professions, as Epstein and Carrick-Hagenbarth rightly argue. That said, this is but one of many ethical issues that arise in the in the context of economic practice.

Economists routinely affect the life chances of others, for better or worse, and often decisively. This is the heart of the case for professional economic ethics. The extent and depth of economists’ influence over others necessarily entail ethical burdens that the profession has been most resistant to engage—in the U.S. and, with few exceptions, across the globe.1 And in the vacuum created by that negligence, economists have come to act badly especially when the stakes are highest and the costs of bad behavior are most grave. If I’m correct—if the problem is as severe as I believe that it is—then this amounts to a failure of the economics profession as a whole rather than of just the individual economists who run afoul of the most basic ethical norms. The chief take-away from “Inside Job” should not be that some economists have acted badly, but that the profession has failed in its deepest ethical obligations. . . .

>>Read the full Article here (DeMartino56-1.pdf).

Copyright: George DeMartino, 2011.